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As some of you may be aware, my post from January 20, 2011, entitled “Should We Expect to Find the Temple Ordinances as One Coherent Whole in the Scriptures? Revisiting the Question”, generated a lengthy and impassioned discussion in the comments. There was much debate regarding the value of efforts to compare our modern temple ordinances with ancient ones, and the methods that should be used in such an endeavor. I very much appreciated this discussion and believe that many important points were raised. It was decided, by some of the involved parties, that a debate over all of the points that I suggested in the post would be a very large and time-consuming task, and that, therefore, it would be more profitable for us to discuss specific rituals (with the associated Scriptural passages), one at a time.

Before moving on with this project, I would just like to clear up a few points — a few misconceptions, maybe, regarding my initial post. First of all, I would like to emphasize that my answer to the titular question, “Should we expect to find the temple ordinances as one coherent whole in the Scriptures?”, was negative. There is, obviously, no passage, narrative, chapter, or any other unit in the Scriptures that presents the Endowment or the entirety of the LDS ritual system as a unity or “coherent whole.” I wasn’t attempting to argue for such. I did explain where we could perhaps look for temple themes outside of the traditional locations. Towards the end of the post, I went a step further and suggested that there is a possibility that (although this is not all clearly perceptible from the Scriptural accounts) the ancient Israelites may have performed ceremonies in the precincts of their temple that may have contained many rituals that are comparable to what we do today in our temples. I acknowledged that the theories upon which this assertion are based are conjectural/speculative, but I think that they are a good place to start.

For my first substantive post here on M*, I wanted to take you back to an issue that was discussed on this blog by M* Ben, back in 2005. M* Ben raised some very relevant and interesting queries for those of us who are familiar with the LDS temple ordinances: “Should we find the Temple ordinances in the Old Testament? If so, should we see them presented as they are today?” His preliminary answers to these two questions were “yes to the first and no to the second.” I agree with M* Ben’s initial conclusions, but I would like to approach these questions from, perhaps, a different angle and present to you some different results. I believe that the temple ordinances that we know today may have been presented as more of a “coherent whole” than M* Ben assumed. (Just to forewarn you, this post may be a little on the long side)